Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Internet vs. Religion

The
internet can add another notch to its gun.The electronic monster has undermined newspapers by providing instant
access to information worldwide.It has
undercut the Post Office with email and other forms of communication.It has destroyed personal relations through
Facebook.People text and twit; they
don’t talk face-to-face as much anymore.

The
internet is in the process of closing libraries, since books, magazines and other publications are increasing on-line.Public
publishing is on its last legs since anyone can publish anything with a couple
buttons.

Older people fill pews.

Religion
is the latest to take a body blow.

A
colleague and I recently discussed the impact of the internet on religion.He asked how his church was going to attract
young people when the pews are filled with senior citizens.The answer is: the church can’t.

Young
people have long been disaffected by religion.That’s particularly true for young adults.Multiple studies show that people 18 to 25
commonly spurn religion as they try to find their place in society.However, in the past, they eventually
returned to faith.

That’s
not true anymore.

A
recent Pew Research poll on Religion and Public life reported the following:

Americans ages
18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans. Fewer young adults
belong to any particular faith than older people do today. They also are less
likely to be affiliated than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations were
when they were young. Fully one-in-four members of the Millennial generation –
so called because they were born after 1980 and began to come of age around the
year 2000 – are unaffiliated with any particular faith.

Indeed,
Millennials are significantly more unaffiliated than members of Generation X
were at a comparable point in their life cycle (20 percent in the late 1990s)
and twice as unaffiliated as Baby Boomers were as young adults (13 percent in
the late 1970s). Young adults also attend religious services less often than
older Americans today. And compared with their elders today, fewer young people
say that religion is very important in their lives.

Young
adults have not completely shunned religion.They still believe in heaven and hell at the same rate as earlier
generations, for example.

The rock of belief has shattered.

Nevertheless,
the generational gap in religious beliefs is huge.That’s the internet at work.

In
the past, we all grew up in somewhat isolated communities.We were brought up on our parents’
belief.That’s all we knew.Our community had people of multiple beliefs,
of course, but we attended the same church as our parents and knew the same
people.We were sure in that belief even
as we challenged it as teenagers.That’s
why most of us went back to the faith of our parents when we settled down with
our families.

That’s
not reality today.We live in a global
community. Our children can easily
access and learn about other beliefs.Claims every religion has of certainty and uniqueness disappear in the
welter of contrasting ideas.

Christianity
can no longer insist that belief in Jesus is the only route to heaven when the
internet reveals multiple good people who belong to other faiths.In fact, more people aren’t Christian than
are.And, most of them seem to be doing
just fine. As for heaven, that's an idea also under attack.

Islam tries to control lives.

Islam
has the same problem.That’s why many
Islamic governments are trying to crackdown on dissidents who may undermine
Islamic teachings. That’s also why the Islamic world stopped producing science
leaders.At one time, the Arabic world
lead the way to knowledge, but that ended close to 900 years ago when religious
leaders discovered that science was contradicting belief.

Modern
terrorism is often keyed by fears that Western ideas will corrupt Islamic
teachings.

The
Catholic Church tried to impose the same restrictions, but didn’t have the same
control after the rise of Protestant dissidents.The result was that the West became the
bastion of scientific knowledge, while the Middle East remains hamstrung by
religious restrictions.

Many
of my Islam students are finding themselves confronted by modern research and
having to make difficult choices about their beliefs.Many have chosen simply to ignore hard-earned
knowledge, such as all the evidence for evolution, to sidestep conflicts.

The internet controls as much as old-time religion.

That
won’t end the tug of war between technology and religion.After all, the internet isn’t going
away.Every day, anyone can read the
latest findings about space, human evolution and other aspects of life which
have eviscerated religious teaching.The
Roman Catholic Church has given up the ghost, accepting the Big Bang Theory and
the Theory of Evolution, neither of which require a deity and both of which directly
contradict age-old religious teachings.

Other religions will not be far behind.

The
end result will be a small cadre of devoted, growing grayer each year, and a
world of younger people who no longer accept the old teachings and are basing
their understanding of the world on a new, electronic god.

Long-time
religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious
history.He also speaks at various
religious organizations throughout Florida.You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.net.He is the author of the famed Unauthorized
Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel
Writers Get Their Information; Noel:
The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols;and Dummies Guide to Comparative
Religion.His books are available on Amazon.com,
Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.He can also be followed on Twitter.

You
can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at
http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

About Me

During his career, Bill has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, advertising copywriter and writer/editor of NASCAR programs, among other jobs. He has won three international awards for stories and programs while working for International Speedway Corp. and was named 2000 Florida Feature Writer of the Year.
He has published four books to date and his writing has appeared in hundreds of local, regional, state and national publications.